Discover the Best Books Written by Munro Leaf

Wilbur Monroe Leaf was an American writer of children's literature who wrote and illustrated nearly 40 books during his 40-year career. He is best known for The Story of Ferdinand (1936), a children's classic that he wrote on a yellow legal-length pad in less than an hour. Labeled as subversive, it stirred an international controversy.

Munroe Wilbur Leaf was born on December 4, 1905, the son of Charles W Leaf (1871-1965) and Emma India Leaf in Hamilton, Maryland. Leaf had an older sister, Elizabeth W Leaf. By 1910; his family lived in Washington, D.C., where his father had established his career as a machinist at the Government Printing Office. 

Leaf studied at the University of Maryland, where he played lacrosse and served as class treasurer, graduating in 1927. He honeymooned with his wife, Margaret Pope, in Europe in 1928. He graduated from Harvard University with a master's degree in English literature in 1931.

He taught secondary school English at the Belmont Hill School in Boston in 1929 and then worked as an editor with the publisher Frederick A. Stokes Company. Leaf once commented, "Early on in my writing career, I realized that if one found some truths worth telling, they should be told to the young in terms that were understandable to them."

He wrote The Story of Ferdinand for his friend, illustrator Robert Lawson. The story, which follows a gentle bull in rural Spain who prefers smelling flowers to bullfighting, sparked considerable controversy because some regarded Ferdinand as a pacifist symbol. Banned in Spain and burned as propaganda in Nazi Germany, the book had over 60 foreign translations and has never gone out of print. 

The story was adapted into a Walt Disney film that won a 1938 Academy Award. Leaf and Lawson's second collaboration, Wee Gillis, about a boy living in Scotland halfway between his father's family in the Highlands and his mother's in the Lowlands, was cited as a 1939 Caldecott Honor Book.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Leaf wrote a regular feature for The American Magazine, titled "Streamlined Samples of the World's Best Stories," offering one-page, jocular, off-the-cuff condensations of Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Romeo and Juliet, and others.